Key Concepts in Cultural Geography

Mike Crang’s interests lie in the field of cultural geography. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. Within this he focused empirically upon on practices of public and oral history, photography and museums looking especially at examples in the UK and Sweden. This interest feeds into looking at what people make of museums and landscapes and thus the study of tourism more generally. He is currently working on the intersection of film, photography and tourism - through a case study using Captain Corelli and Cephallonia. From the angle of visual aesthetics and senses of temporality and rhythm, he has become interested in not just issues of preservation and conservation but also their converse - destruction, dereliction and decay - as a collaborator on the ESRC project ‘The Waste of the World’. On this project he has looked at the figuring of global flows through waste - especially ships in the work of differing photographic traditions. He has also explored the creation of wastescapes in (former) industrial sites, on beaches and between places. Subsequent work on the material cultures of waste is attempting to rethink approaches to the commodity through emphasising unbecoming things - that are both distasteful and unstable. He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality. The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore’s ‘Wired City’ initiative and the ‘digital divide’ in UK cities. He completed an ESRC project on ‘Multi-Speed Cities and the Logistics of Daily Life’ with Steve Graham and is now working on the notion of a ‘sentient city’ and the politics of new forms of visualisation and locative computing. In terms of service to the wider discipline he is a senior editor and co-editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, while being on the editorial board of Environment & Planning A, Geography Compass, Mondes du Tourisme, and previously Social and Cultural Geography. He was on the committee then secretary then chair of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG (1995-2006) and is currently on the scientific committee of the Societa Italiana di Scienze del Turismo. Within the department he has been Chair of the IT committee, convenor of research clusters, convenor of MA programmes in Space, Place and Culture and European Urban and Regional Change, and Director of the Geography and Cities degree programme and Director of Research (2003-6, 2008-10).